The below is an excerpt from the transcription of "Melbourne forum" under the title of‘Managing Muslim-Christian Relations' conducted in 2004. Dr. Patricia Martinez is a Malaysian Catholic scholar who studied Islam at Temple University. She has engaged in some research activities in Malaysia as well so far, although she had to face some unnecessary disturbances or obstacles from certain Muslim sections. I just picked up and focused mainly on her comments and opinions from the long discussion. (Lily)
"Managing Muslim-Christian Relations" 16 May 2004 (http://www.abc.net.au/m/encounter/stories/2004/1106066.htm)
A Melbourne forum looks at how can educational policy can be implemented to encourage Muslims and Christians to work together here in Australia and elsewhere.
Margaret Coffey: Pakistani, Kaiser Bengali. And if religious dialogue - talking about our beliefs and faith - isn't entirely the answer, be warned. The language of tolerance, managing Muslim-Christian relations so that we can tolerate each other, that's not good enough either ... as Patricia Martinez from Malaysia made clear when she responded to the comments of two fellow Malaysians.
Patricia Martinez: Both of them used the language of specifically the word "toleration", and this is really not helpful especially if you are formulating education policies where we are taught that we tolerate another person. The etymology of the word tolerate originated in poison - how much poison in the Middle Ages could you tolerate before you died. There is a paternalism inherent in it and I think we need to move beyond that.
The second speaker also quite happily used the word non-Muslims and we use it, I use it. But it holds another religion normative - it is another thing we need to get beyond. It is the specifics of what we say and what we do that children pick up. They learn their worldviews from the language that we use. You are non-Muslim; that makes you not normative. We tolerate you; that makes me endure you. I hear this language in the United States, people are tolerating Muslims - oh hello, that is really, really offensive.
Patricia Martinez: I'm going to refer to it as the WCEP, the Whole Child Education Project - the government of Indonesia together with the Global Dialogue Institute (this is Leonard Swidler's outfit) with the support of UNICEF Indonesia. (fades under following)
Margaret Coffey: The Global Dialogue Institute is based at Temple University in Pennsylvania and Dr Martinez was appointed to evaluate the way it had gone about teaching what the Institute - GDI - calls "deep dialogue and critical thinking" to primary school students in two areas of Indonesia well outside the tourist trail.
Patricia Martinez: WCEP was a highly innovative project, that is among the first of its kind anywhere in the world. Its objectives were number one, to enable a new generation of Indonesians to understand, accept and live with their ethnic and religious diversity. The focus was to enable children to accept difference. This is essential. Tolerance is not a paradigm .. it is about enduring and suffering through you and as we all know as human beings we have very limited abilities to endure and to suffer. So tolerance doesn't work, we have to accept difference.
The immediate objective was to create changes in the teaching/learning processes based on the philosophy and practice of deep dialogue using critical thinking skills - this is what the consultants had said. The ultimate objective was that through the education system Indonesians will overcome the way religion and ethnicity divide the nation. In other words, the plan was if we could implement this throughout Indonesia we raise a new generation who think differently.
Patricia Martinez: The idea was to teach children basic methodologies and structures where they would get children in clusters - this is what they mean by cooperative learning - where they would ask children what do you see .. is it different, how is it different, what do you see, how is a square a square, how is a circle a circle .. so this was a real challenge because those of you who understand our Asian ways of education .. it is the way to change a generation to say Um different, it helps me learn, different but I understand.
The level, education level of primary school teachers in Indonesia is pretty low so there was a workshop to Indonesian-ise the project - that was still insufficient. I think in the end everyone was people of good will but the professors involved, the Americans involved were unable to say I make that step, I stand here in Indonesia and what does it mean. It is very difficult.
Patricia Martinez: Now the results. Less than half of those trained understood clearly what DDC was at the end of the exercise. Part of the reason the GDI model of what constituted dialogue and critical thinking for primary school children was resourced by a theologian and a philosopher and remained largely philosophical, abstract as well as uncontextualised for Indonesia.
I am also going to share something else with you for those of you who go out and do something like this. When we have consultants come in we have to tell them very, very clearly - you are called consultants, you are coming in for huge salaries but you are not in charge - that was not said. So essentially it was driven by a philosopher and by Americans - I have nothing against philosophers and Americans, that's part of my background, I am just trying to tell you the pitfalls! Other reasons include the problems and limitations of translation and the considerably lower level of education among most primary school teachers in Indonesia.
The positive outcomes: the teachers and children began to actually do cooperative learning. Teachers would ask them what they think. Teachers would say to them do you want to come up to the blackboard and do this rather than say you come up. But, the most important element of this exercise, which is, that children learn to interact among themselves, that children of difference are put together, didn't happen. The consultant should have had a component where children actually go out, if they have to go to a mosque, they go to a church, they go to a celebration of another religious or racial group - that would be very enabling, that didn't happen.
Negatives: the methodologies were not fully implemented because a lack of understanding it. Again, our Asian way - it's always top down. So you take this precious wonderful handbook in training and I try no matter what to do it. The teachers were not told, wing it, take it, change it, and then when this woman comes to evaluate you tell her how you changed it. They were not told that. Unfortunately many of the consultants came with the sense that we have done it in America, it worked, we know it all.
Patricia Martinez: The participants were not sufficiently motivated as to why the project was important for Indonesia. We had the Minister of Education come, we had the Head of UNICEF to come and speak to the teachers, but nobody sat and said to the teachers, sit together and tell us why you think Indonesia needs this project. This is a really very imperative element - you have to internalise it. And most of all, I found that punishment was a very serious issue in the school and while we are trying to create wholesome children who will relate to each other, they would tell me in their focus groups with no adults around, how painful, how humiliating they found punishment and if a child has been humiliated that child often works out their anger on who? Their peers. We all do it.
Margaret Coffey: Dr Patricia Martinez, reporting on the Whole Child Education Project in Indonesia administered by the Global Dialogue Institute. And she was reporting there to Asialink's conference on Managing Muslim Christian relations held at Melbourne University earlier this year. Patricia Martinez did have good words to say about the conference.
Patricia Martinez: The focus was different with this conference because they had moved from an interfaith meeting to education policies and I really liked that because from my own experience of numerous inter-faith meetings - they are good meetings with good people but they are severely limited. We meet in a safe place, we talk to the converted among us and we talk about safe topics and meanwhile outside in the real world people are killing each other in the name of religion. So I think there are severe limitations to inter-faith meetings - we need to move these meetings into actual reality, into programs and I emphasise programs which will enable interfaith interaction. That isn't happening enough.
Patricia Martinez: I come from a Christian background and my perspective now having studied Islam for so long, my perspectives go across both boundaries. I think what was very useful for our Muslim brothers and sisters was that there was a space where they could articulate the fact that they felt they needed to be self-critical. But as they themselves have said to me they are not sure if they will say this in a 100 per cent Muslim audience depending on where they were and the same would apply to me.
I have severe constraints as a non-Muslim who does her work in Islam, there are things I could never say in public. In a sense I understand this self-policing that we do. I think it is called the civility that enables us to live together in the world. However, it has also become a somewhat silencing dynamic. I feel increasingly and sometimes with a lot of pain that we really, really need to have these conversations; sometimes we need to have them publicly. Sometimes we need to open the space and ask others gently but firmly to let us have these conversations even if they themselves are uncomfortable with them.
Dr Patricia Martinez: Head, Intercultural Studies and Senior Research Fellow, Asia-Europe Institute, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
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